Effective co-parenting means detaching from our private, personal biases as women and as lovers for the sake of the love that is most genuine to us: our children. Our first perception of love in relationships is often the one that we see reflected by our parents. Every family is plagued with the burden of dysfunction, but in the age of social media, our disagreements are taken a step further and made public, amplifying domestic disputes.
In 2018, family matters manifest into screenshots and shady social media posts that put everybody and their mom (literally) in your business.
After a very public divorce in 2014, Rose and Khalifa show us that good parenting means putting aside a rough history for the person that matters most. Even if it means dressing up as Suicide Squad's power couple Harley Quinn and The Joker for their son Sebastian's 5th birthday party.
Amber and Wiz have definitely come a long way. It's no secret that Amber had a sordid past in the media. Years ago, the divorced couple made headlines when Wiz made a song about his ex-wife featuring the lyric, "I fell in love with a stripper, but I fell out of love quicker." Amber expressed her hurt over his words during her annual SlutWalk tearfully.
In the age where life through the scope of social media is more like reality TV, we forget that the real victims of public dysfunction are the children who are put in the middle of our sticky, adult mess.
As a child, our first perception of love is reflected by the love we see between our parents. I think about my own relationships and I can see that many of the behaviors that I tolerated and exhibited mirror those of my parent's relationship. Their relationship was so intense, so toxic, that I subconsciously yearned to find that same love for myself. I've wanted my parents to get a divorce since I was 10 years old. They were both such strong and intense people I felt that they would thrive, separately.
For years, my mother told me that she wanted to leave my father but wouldn't because she was afraid that I would want to stay with him. I would have much rathered separated parents, than unhappy ones. There is a toxic notion from the past that still lingers in the black community that it is better for a child to have parents that are married, happily or not. The first thing my family says someone is pregnant is, "Well, are they getting married?"
So what happens when you've created the most wonderful person in your life with someone that you've outgrown or have no desire to see again if you had the choice?
How do you find balance when the person with whom you've created the love of your life is not your soulmate? The concept of co-parenting is an effective and progressive ideal that expresses that we all have the right to be happy and do what's best for our children as a team, even if we chose to not be romantically involved.
In the past, Amber described co-parenting with Wiz in an interview with UsWeekly last November:
"We both love our son, so it just comes easy. We don't live that far away from each other, so anytime Sebastian wants to come back here or go with his dad [he can]."
But what comes easy for her, is not often the case for most women.
Be careful with your energy; the eternal battle for your power as a mother and a woman can be taxing and deplete you spiritually and mentally gradually over time. Compromise means everything except when it comes to the happiness or well-being of you and your child.
The only way to break the cycle of dysfunction that we learned as children is to confront and reject it in our own lives, and to consequently develop a more positive perception of love.
Co-parenting is a two-person job and isn't for the weak-hearted. Sacrifice, compromise, and persistence until you get it right as a team are well worth the reward of displaying a positive message of love to your child.
About a month ago, Wiz even shouted Amber out in a freestyle on Big Boy's neighborhood saying:
"I still love her, she loves me too/
You think I'ma talk bad about her, you're through/
I never will, that's the mother of my kid..."
Pretty straight to the point.
I can't say that Wiz and Amber have a perfect co-parenting relationship because there is always room for improvement in any relationship; but even if they were having problems, they've mastered the art of privacy.
To the public eye, though they live separate lives and have moved onto new relationships, they can put aside old drama from the past; at least in public, and at least for their child, which is all you can ask for from a good co-parenting team.
Featured image by Getty Images
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Today, that movement has turned into a wig uprising where Black women are able to experiment with colors, styles, and more without causing irreparable damage to our hair. It could even be said that we’ve arrived at a new level of acceptance: one that does not equate love of oneself to one’s willingness or lack thereof to wear her hair the way others deem acceptable. Not even other people who look like us.
However, as with Blackness itself, the issue of Black women’s hair is layered.
On the surface, it’s nothing more than a matter of personal preference. However, in a deeper dive, issues of texture, curl pattern, and of course, proximity to social acceptance, as well as other runoff streams from the waters of racism and patriarchy, rear their heads. The natural hair movement, though a wide-reaching and liberating community builder, also gave way to colorism and often upheld mainstream beauty standards.
Sometimes, favoring lighter-skinned influencers/creators with very specific hair textures, the white gaze leaked into our safe space and forced us to reckon with it. Accurate representations of natural hair in various states of being—undefined curls, kinks, and unlaid edges—are still absent from brand marketing. Protective styles, though intended to provide breaks from styling for our sensitive hair, have become a mask to help our hair be more palatable. A figurative straddle of the fence in order to appease the comfort of others in the face of our hair’s power.
And then there’s the issue of length.
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As a woman who has spent much of the last decade voluntarily wearing her hair in many variations of short hairstyles, from a pixie cut to a curly fro and a sleek bob, what I’ve gleaned throughout the years is that there is a glaring difference between how I am treated when wearing my hair short than when I opt for weaves, extensions or even grow it out slightly longer than my chin.
The differential treatment comes from women and men alike and spans professional and personal settings, including friends, coworkers, and industry peers.
What has become abundantly clear is that long hair is often conflated with beauty, softness, and any number of other words we relate to femininity in a way that short hair is not. That perceived marker of the essence of womanhood shows up in how I am received, communicated with, and complimented.
Even more so than texture, length has a way of deciding who among us is deserving of our attention, affection, and adoration. Whether naturally grown or proudly bought, the commentary around someone’s look or image greatly shifts when “inches” are present.
When it comes to long hair, we really, really do care.
In an effort to understand whether I had simply been misinterpreting the energy around my hair, I decided to take my findings to social media. I began with two side-by-side photos of myself. In both pictures, my hair is straightened; however, in one, I am wearing my signature pixie cut, and in the other, I am wearing extensions.
I posited that treatment based on hair length is a real thing, and what followed was confirmation that I was not alone in my feelings. “Long hair, like light skin, button noses, and being thin are all forms of social capital,” one user commented. “Some Black women enforce the status quo too, why wouldn’t we?”
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This also brought to mind the many times celebrity women (like most recently Beyoncé's Cécred hair tutorial) have done big reveals of their own natural tresses in an attempt to silence any doubt that Black women are able to grow their hair beyond a certain length. Of course, we all know that to be true, so why do we still feel the need to prove it so?
The responses continued to pour in from women of all skin tones, who felt that hair length played a role in people’s treatment of them. “When I have short hair I always feel like people don’t treat me like a woman, they treat me like a kid,” another user commented. “When my hair is long I get a lot more respect for some reason.”
From revelations about feeling invisible to admitted shifts in their own perceived beauty, Black woman after Black woman poured out her experience as it relates to hair length. Though affirmed by their shared realities, knowing that reactions to something so trivial have become yet another hair battle for Black women to fight was disheartening. Though we continue to defy gravity and push the bounds of imagination and creativity by way of our strands, will it always be in response to the idea that we are, somehow, falling short?
Unlike more obvious instances of hair discrimination, the glorification of longer length is sneakier in its connection to Eurocentric beauty standards. Hair commercials, beauty ads, and even hip-hop music have long celebrated the idea of gloriously long tresses while holding onto the ignorant notion that it is inaccessible for Black women.
Even as we continue to fight to prove our hair professional, elegant, and worthy in its natural state to the world at large, we’ve also adopted harmful value markers of our own as a community. It’s evident in how we talk about who has the right to start a haircare line and which influencers we easily platform. It’s evident in the language we use to identify those with long hair versus short hair. And it’s painfully obvious in how we treat one another.
It makes me wonder if India.Arie’s brave rallying cry, almost two decades old in its existence, will ever actually hold true for us. Or will we just continue to invent new ways to uphold the harmful status quo?
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Feature image by Willie B. Thomas/ Getty Images
